Radio Sputnik's Loud & Clear spoke Wednesday with Marvin Weinbaum, the Scholar-in-Residence and director of the Middle East Institute's Center for Pakistan and Afghanistan Studies, about how the election seems to be turning out and what it means for Pakistan.
Parties will have to win 137 of the 342 seats in the National Assembly, the lower house of the country's parliament, in order to form a government. If they cannot win an absolute majority, they must form a coalition government with other parties in order to reach at least 137 MPs.
With Al Jazeera projecting that Imran Khan's PTI [Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf, or Pakistan Movement for Justice] would carry between 94 and 102 seats in parliament, the future of the ruling PML-N [Pakistan Muslim League — Nawaz], led by Nawaz Sharif, hangs in the balance.
Likewise, Bilawal Bhutto Zardari of the Pakistan People's Party noted with suspicion the delay in announcing the first set of official results.
By 4 a.m. Thursday, two hours after a result was expected to be announced, only 37 percent of the votes had been counted, the Guardian noted. Pakistan's chief election commissioner, Sardar Raza Khan, said he did not want to mislead anyone by giving an exact time for when all results would be out.
Raza Khan rejected charges of election rigging in a news conference early Thursday morning, saying the process had been completely "fair and transparent," the Guardian reported. "There is no stain on the electoral process… Why do you think the five political parties [who have alleged rigging] are speaking the truth and the election commission is not? There is no problem with the results. Wait for the results."
"I don't believe the military wanted to see a strong plurality on the part of the PTI," Weinbaum said. "I think they would have been happy with a very fragile coalition that can be put together."
The scholar said it won't be difficult for Khan to assemble such a coalition, either: smaller parties and religious parties can easily be won over by him, plus there are also the independent MPs, who are self-serving and will "go wherever power is to protect their own interests in the next regime."